Asha did tease the return of blades when she first took over 👀

First confirmation we’ve gotten that the next XBOX OS is being built directly on Windows

I always thought they should do something like this. E.g a Family game pass with games only with E rating. Or a Retro game pass for retro game lovers. 

Jez Cordon is confirming Kotaku's reporting that The Coalition had an INSANE $500 million budget with E-Day. However, he also points out that everything The Coalition has created over the last 7 years was built from scratch, so it all will be used in their next game. Something that the head of the studio seemingly confirmed when he said their next game will not take nearly as long since they have all the tools they need now.

So it gets more unclear on the financing side since we don't know how much of that insane budget goes towards all the tools and assets, and how much of the budget was on the production of the game itself. Since all the tools and assets are already completed, E-Day 2, or whatever they make next, could have a substantially smaller budget and wouldn't need to take another 7 years to make.

Still, what an insane time we're in for AAA development.

If the character assets, weapons, animations, etc are all brought over that would save a ton of time and money. Sure tweak some things and add new weapons. But an E-Day 2 doesn't need better visuals than what we got. 

A sequel would still likely cost $200M to $300M and take 3 or 4 years.

Something still feels off about that number to me. Payroll for 270 people at The Coalition for 7 years should come out to around $160-180m, benefits package for those 270 should be around $50-70m. I can't imagine voice actor pay across the whole cast could have been more than like $3m, video game voice actors aren't paid that well even after the long SAG-AFTRA strike. That $500m figure supposedly didn't include marketing since Xbox pays that themselves. 

Yeah as an outsider looking in, that is a strange figure to get towards. But then again, idk anything about how video game financials are spent outside of employee salaries.

This is like the third figure we've gotten now, and now if management doesn't come out to debunk it, then journalists will take it to be true. Sucks to constantly be in the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" state because now you have to constantly be online to see whatever rumor comes up to address.

I don't think we'll get a word on this, though, because this doesn't have any sort of effect on public perception of what's happening at XBOX compared to things like XBOX being unhappy with GTA 6 pre-orders and that XBOX secured cloud streaming rights for GTA 6.

Constantly different reported figures on a game's budget? Not as important.

One thing is for sure.....Phil's spending went waaaaaaaaay overboard! I mean, we're talking the same Phil who let a project like South of Midnight somehow have a $100 million budget. I imagine that most of the projects he greenlit have 9 figure budgets.

At the same time, I'm sure he truly believed it would pay off. Netflix was booming, so he thought GP could get that number of subs, coupled with the gaming boom of lockdown during COVID.

Unfortunately, it just didn't pay off, and Xbox's spending got out of control. Now Brian Fargo at inXile is saying how Asha is ensuring that studios balance sheets are under control and that they release a viable product to sell.